ProPublica, an operation that is becoming more valuable almost by the hour, has practiced journalism on us, damn them, and provided the single most coherent description of how the IRS became such a marvelous environment for dumbassery that, sooner or later, some gears would come loose in a fashion that would enable Senator Aqua Buddha to start channelling whatever's coming in through the fillings in his teeth. In short, if you spend four decades getting government down to the size at which it can be drowned in a bathtub, and then there's this Supreme Court decision that dumps a shit-ton of campaign-finance regulatiory work onto a system that, on its best day, is singularly ill-suited to deal with that job, then dumbassery is bound to result.

Moves launched in the 1990s were designed to streamline the tax agency and make it more efficient. But they had unintended consequences for the IRS's Exempt Organizations division Checks and balances once in place were taken away. Guidance frequently published by the IRS and closely read by tax lawyers and nonprofits disappeared. Even as political activity by social welfare nonprofits exploded in recent election cycles, repeated requests for the IRS to clarify exactly what was permitted for the secretly funded groups were met, at least publicly, with silence.

Even then, of course, the president was plotting with the Kenyan Alinskyite Muslim psy-ops people to inconvenience some angry shut-ins in Alabama.

In the end, this contributed to what everyone from Republican lawmakers to the president says was a major mistake: The decision by the Ohio unit to flag for further review applications from groups with "Tea Party" and similar labels. This started around March 2010, with little pushback from Washington until the end of June 2011. "It's really no surprise that a number of these cases blew up on the IRS," said Marcus Owens, who ran the Exempt Organizations division from 1990 to 2000. "They had eliminated the trip wires of 25 years." Of course, any number of structural fixes wouldn't stop rogue employees with a partisan ax to grind. No one, including the IRS and the inspector general, has presented evidence that political bias was a factor, although congressional and FBI investigators are taking another look.But what is already clear is that the IRS once had a system in place to review how applications were being handled and to flag potentially problematic ones. The IRS also used to show its hand publicly, by publishing educational articles for agents, issuing many more rulings, and openly flagging which kind of nonprofit applications would get a more thorough review.

If you arrange it so that government can't work, then government won't be able to work. I think Aristotle first said that. Or Huntz Hall.

All of those checks and balances disappeared in recent years, largely the unforeseen result of an IRS restructuring in 1998, former officials and tax lawyers say.

Does anyone else remember what happened in 1998? There was another second-term Democratic president to hamstring, and a Republican House went after the IRS in order to help them do that. There were dozens of people with dozens of horror stories trotted out before Congress, just as I guarantee you there will be in the next couple of weeks, and several months worth of congressional high-sterics on the topic.

The Democrats complained that the hearings were one-sided and partisan. Mr. Moynihan noted that committee rules required that all senators receive copies of testimony a day in advance, but that Senator William V. Roth Jr., the Delaware Republican who is the chairman of the committee, kept the Democrats in the dark until testimony began.Mr. Roth said he was trying to protect witnesses from reprisals by the I.R.S. His implicit criticism of the Democrats as allies of the tax agency went unchallenged by the Democrats on the panel.

And there is always the subtext behind any of this by which it becomes of paramount importance to rig the tax code further in favor of the wealthiest Americans.

In detail, but without naming companies or taxpayers, they explained how the system lets individual audit supervisors eliminate tax bills that can run to the hundreds of millions of dollars. They told of companies that had agreed to pay tax bills only to have those bills cut by audit supervisors who hoped to get lucrative jobs helping companies negotiate lower tax bills with the I.R.S. One of three, Maureen O'Dwyer, an auditor who works on multinational companies based in New York, told of orders to purge audit papers that supported her findings of huge corporate taxes that were due. Ginger Mary Jarvis, another tax auditor in New York, gave details of influence peddling on behalf of rich individuals and corporations by former I.R.S. officials who now work in private practice. And Minh Thi Johnson told of orders to send unsophisticated companies bogus tax bills.

Plus ca change, plus ca Dave Camp, beetyotches.

And now, 25 years later, the results of those previous, highly politicized IRS hearings is to shred the system so that dumbassery became inevitable, and now has prompted another round of highly politicized IRS hearings. With a little help, as ProPublica points out, from the nine wise souls across the street from the Capitol.

Social welfare nonprofits were only a small part of the exempt division's work, considered minor when compared with charities. When the groups sought IRS recognition, the agency usually rubber-stamped them. Out of 24,196 applications for social welfare status between 1998 and 2009, the exempt organizations division rejected only 77, according to numbers compiled from annual IRS data books. Into this loophole came the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision in January 2010, which changed the campaign-finance game by allowing corporate and union spending on elections. Sensing an opportunity, some political consultants started creating social welfare nonprofits geared to political purposes. By 2012, more than $320 million in anonymous money poured into federal elections.

Is it possible any more to have an honest debate on how to make government work better? (I know. We have to have a general consensus that it should work at all, and we do not have that among our two political parties any more. But play along.) This is a problem that was entirely predictable. You give fewer people more and more work, and deluge them with new responsibilities virtually on the fly, with no corresponding increase in logistical support, and those people will seek out shortcuts. On this, doth dumbassery thrive. We seem incapable in our politics to accept that simple fact any more.